The invention concerns a continuous-conveyance bulk-cargo ship unloader. It has a boom. An elephant trunk swings from one end of the boom. The elephant trunk has a hollow cylindrical shaft. The shaft accommodates an upright conveyor. There is a free-sweeping cargo-intake assembly at the bottom of the elephant trunk. The intake assembly comprises a cargo pickup, the lower section of the conveyor, and a conveyor loader that transfers the cargo from the pickup to the conveyor section.
A continuous-conveyance bulk-cargo ship unloader is known from the as yet unpublished German patent application no. 4 125 109.1. At the bottom is a cargo pickup in the form of a scooper head or bucket wheel that rotates around an upright axis.
The cargo pickup transfers the cargo radially to another upright conveyor. The second conveyor can be a belt-sandwich conveyor and more specifically a foam-belt conveyor, a U-section conveyor, or a rippled-edge conveyor. Foam-belt conveyors are described in German Pat. Nos. 2 236 102, 2 333 100, and 2 261 115, U-section conveyors in Swedish Pat. Nos. 705 052-2 and 8 800 315-7, and rippled-edge conveyors in the as yet unpublished German application No. 4 121 996.1.
The screw conveyor and cargo pickup and the opening into the conveyor loader are positioned in relation to the axis of the belt-sandwich conveyor such that all the material will be flung as intended into the throat of the conveyor's intake slot.
The upright section of the belt-sandwich conveyor is inside the elephant trunk.
Belt-sandwich conveyors are upright conveyors that convey a bulk material by compressing it between two belts. At least one belt is driven. If only one is driven, the other is entrained by friction.
To allow flow rates ranging from zero to the maximum possible, the space between the belts must be variable within certain limits. The squeeze rollers, or at least the squeeze rollers resting against one of the belts, the pressure belt, can accordingly be mounted resiliently. Alternatively the pressure belt itself can be resilient, made of foam for example, and travel through a trough between the sets of rollers.
In the section of the conveyor in which the bulk material is conveyed upward, many directly adjacent rollers squeeze the ascending strand of the pressure belt against the ascending strand of the counterpressure belt. The rollers that squeeze the descending strands can be farther apart. The descending strands can also be squeezed by a farther-apart roller or roller trough against one of the rollers or troughs that squeezes an ascending strand.